Sir Ian McKellen.
SIR IAN MCKELLEN: A KNIGHT OUT IN L.A.
By
Alex Simon
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the May 1997 issue of Venice Magazine.
When I was a freshman in high school, my English teacher showed our class a videotaped performance of a one-man show called Acting Shakespeare, which starred a young English actor named Ian McKellen. In it, the actor talked about his life, his love of the theater and how performing Shakespeare had become his singular passion in life. Then, after talking about it for while, he showed us.
Up until that day, I viewed Shakespeare as a dead guy who wrote insomnia-inducing plays, whose characters wore tights and talked funny, and whose plots were, to say the least, incomprehensible to a 14 year-old kid in Tempe, Arizona. Two hours with Ian McKellen changed all that. Acting Shakespeare demonstrated that the Bard and his works were every bit as funny as The Blues Brothers (this was 1981, remember), every bit as relevant and timely as the evening news, and every bit as riveting dramatically as The Godfather. In short, he made Shakespeare accessible for me, which in turn aided me immeasurably as a writer, as a lover of the theater, and as a person. It is a gift for which I will always be in Ian McKellen's debt.
Sir Ian McKellen was born in 1939 in the north of England. In 1961, he majored in English Literature at Cambridge University and became a professional actor without going to drama school. Throughout the 1960's he worked non-stop, on stages in London and all over the United Kingdom and starred in the BBC-TV production of David Copperfield. He made his Broadway debut in 1967 with The Promise, one of his West End hits.
The 1970's saw him continue to triumph in the world of the theater, culminating with his winning three Olivier Awards in a row for his work with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Next, he conquered Broadway as Salieri in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, winning every available award in the 1980-81 season and "loving every minute of it." On his return to London, he was the Royal Television Society's Performer of the Year as the mentally handicapped hero of Stephen Frears' Walter. He also garnered raves for his portrayal of disgraced British Cabinet Minister John Profumo in Michael Caton-Jones' Scandal in 1989.
After his award-winning Iago for the RSC, he starred in and produced the National Theater's world tour of Richard III, which ended at UCLA's Royce Hall in 1993. Sir Ian and the production were lauded for their innovative modern interpretation of Richard as a 1930's fascist dictator. His screenplay adaptation was filmed for MGM/UA and he was voted European Film Actor of the Year, with a Golden Globe nomination. Since then, he has acted exclusively for the screen in Six Degrees of Separation, And the Band Played On, Jack & Sarah, Restoration, Cold Comfort Farm, Bent, Amy Foster, and is currently filming Bryan (The Usual Suspects) Singer's Apt Pupil, for Mike Medavoy and Phoenix Pictures. In the Fall, Sir Ian returns to the London stage with the National Theater's new production of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People.
In 1990, Sir Ian was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to the performing arts and made international headlines by coming out as an openly gay man just before the knighthood was bestowed. He is co-founder of the Stonewall Group, which lobbies for the legal and social equality of lesbians and gay men in the UK. His new one man show, A Knight Out in Los Angeles, directed by Gregory Cooke and being staged at LATC, is an evening of chat, reminiscence and performance telling the story of two parallel journeys. Alone on-stage, Sir Ian recalls his childhood fascination with the theater and his experience of acting in London's West End, on Broadway, in Los Angeles, and beyond, as well as his early awareness of being gay and how that awareness affected him. All proceeds earned for the performances will be donated to: GLAAD, the Ian McKellen Scholarship in Acting at UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, Highways Performance Space and Gallery, The L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center Youth Services Department, and the Hobart Boulevard School Shakespeare Program.
Journeying up to Sir Ian's home in the Hollywood Hills, I felt a bit apprehensive. After all, I'd never met a knight before, much less an actor whom I've admired since childhood. Do I call him 'Sir,' 'Mister,' 'Ian,' 'Sir Ian,' maybe 'S.I.'? I was confused. That confusion was soon put to rest as Sir Ian, his hair dyed gray for his role in Apt Pupil, greeted me warmly at his door with "Hello, I'm Ian. What can I get for you? Coffee, tea, maybe some scrambled eggs?" I admitted that the prospect of having scrambled eggs prepared for me by a genuine British Knight did sound intriguing, so I happily accepted and so began our conversation. In addition to being a most gracious host, Sir Ian proved to be a delightful, witty and fascinating conversationalist. And besides, he makes the greatest scrambled eggs in the world!
Let's start at the beginning with your childhood...
SIR IAN MCKELLEN: I grew up in South Lancashire, a part of Northern England which we called "the dirty South," heavily industrial. My father was a civil engineer who worked for the local authority and was in charge of housing. And after the war you can imagine how many houses were being built. He was in charge of designing the houses and building them. He was in charge of all the roads in the town, all the sewers in the town, all the lights in the town, all the architecture of the town...it was a wonderful job because he could just mold what the place was going to look like twenty-five years down the road. But unfortunately he made a mess of it. Like a lot of people of that era, he was very excited about high-rises and did away with most of the lovely old architecture that did exist there.
Any siblings?
I've got a sister, who's five years older than me. She's married, has a family, kids. She just retired. She was a teacher. But my family's not a big part of my life, which I touch on in the show. I went off to Cambridge to study English and I've not really been back (to South Lancashire).
So how does a boy from 'the dirty south' fall in love with the theater?
Easily! In the town where I grew up there were five theaters for 150,000 people. There were movie theaters and also a repertory company, which means a group of actors who stay together for a year and do a different play every week. Under-rehearsed. Dreadful. But my parents and I used to go to that regularly. The two other theaters, one took touring companies in and stayed for a week, ballet companies, opera companies...again, not first rate, but the B tour rather than the A tour. But next door to that was the Grand Theater which really was the one that made the most impression on me. It had variety acts, vaudeville, stand-up comics, soloists, dog acts, armless man shaving himself with his feet acts...(laughs). And my father knew the man who owned the Grand and I was allowed to go backstage. So by the time I was 10, 11, 12 I was mad about the theater, not as a performer, but as part of the audience. That's probably been one of my saving graces as an actor is that I initially didn't do it for ego's sake but because I was fascinated by the process and wanted to see how it was done. And I suppose what it was, was when I went backstage and saw them all getting ready to go on, nervous, or angry with each other...but when they stepped out on the stage, they were different people entirely. The line in the wings between reality and the entertainment itself was a sort of magic area, and I still feel it backstage. So that really hooked me and then I started acting in school and then the clincher as far as being a professional actor was when I was at school there was a headmaster who thought it was perfectly appropriate for boys to do theater or whatever else they wanted. So I got a lot of encouragement there, as well. Then I met a group of people at Cambridge who were as mad about the theater as I was. That group included Sir Derek Jacobi, Trevor Nunn, Peter Cook, most of the Monty Python troupe, David Frost...Funny story about David, during final exams he stumbled into my room, borrowed all my notes, of which he had none, went back and took his purple hearts, or whatever it was they took in those days to stay awake. Then with my notes, took his final exams and got the same degree that I did. I've never really forgiven him for that! There should be some sort of recompense, don't you think?(laughs) But there is no drama program at Cambridge. You just have students putting on amateur productions. And in those days you had national critics coming down to see our productions. And by the time I left, I had been in 21 productions and had a clutch of very good reviews. So I could go into a work situation and present this evidence and drama school didn't really seem necessary. (pause) That was a really long answer, wasn't it? (laughs)
I know that part of A Knight Out deals with the fact that you're an openly gay man and you talk about that experience. Did you always know you were gay?
Yes. I think as soon as you start being sexually aware at four, five, six it just keeps coming into your life. Then one day you put it all together, your experience, and give it a name. Most people, being straight, don't have to give it a name because they just think of themselves as going through what everybody else is going through...and family and society and everything else is set up to encourage them to think this way and what they're going through is normal and that everything's going to work out all right, which eventually it won't if you're gay. And not only do you usually not have any support from your family, but society at large is telling you that what you are and what you think and what you feel about other people is wrong. I think it explains why, from such an early age, I clung to this hobby of theater-going and then turned it into a passion and then an obsession and then an absolute way of life. Then the most important thing in my life. And I was only really released from the stranglehold of my career over me when I came out...but the first erotic images I ever remember seeing in books, magazines, film was always the male. I went through a little heterosexual phase, but I grew out of it! (laughs)
You've played a number of very dark, disturbing characters: MacBeth, Richard III and now the Nazi war criminal Dussander in Apt Pupil. Do you ever find yourself taking your work home with you when have to go into these dark places?
I take my work home with me in the sense that I worry about it. I'm a dreadful friend when I'm working, especially the closer I get to opening night. But no, if you're playing MacBeth or Richard III or Iago, you don't say to yourself 'Okay, here I am. I'm playing a really evil man, so now I have to be evil as well.' On the contrary, you stick up for your characters. You look for the humanity in the character. MacBeth's ambition. Well, we can all relate to that. He just takes ambition too far. You really shouldn't kill to get the job. I'm sure everyone in America is taught to kill to get the job, but you musn't take that literally. (laughs) And (MacBeth) is puzzling away because he knows what's right and wrong, and he can't quite understand why he keeps doing what he knows is wrong. He's terribly self-aware. But he has a lot of humanity in him, as well. He has a wonderful sense of humor, as Iago has as well, of course. Iago's inner troubles, I think, are sexually based. He's got a marriage he finds unsatisfactory and is clearly sexually jealous of Othello's happy marriage. He says "I don't like him because I think he may have fucked my wife." A man who can say that out loud to an audience has got real problems, and then he does dreadful things. So the darkness you take home with you is of a man who's unhappy and what you're going into and discovering in yourself are those humane things like "I can't relate to my wife any longer." "I'm jealous because that man got what should have been my job." Richard III the same. Another ambitious man who's trying to overcompensate for a physical handicap. So we're talking about very ordinary people, really. And that's what's so wonderful about Shakespeare.
The thing that characters like MacBeth, Richard III, Iago and Salieri (from Amadeus) all have in common is the main fear that we all have, especially artists, and that is that they're mediocre, and not special. Do you think that's what taps into so many people and what's kept these plays alive for so many years, that universal feeling we all have?
Could be. I think the plays that are popular, if you're talking about the classics, differ from generation to generation. They go in and out of fashion. The Merchant of Venice, for example, hasn't been done for quite some time, especially in this country. At times people have enjoyed Richard III as a one man show. Now people are starting to do the full text again, realizing it's not just about one man, it's about an extraordinary, charismatic man who is very typical of the group that he lives amongst, who are all ambitious, angry politicians who are related to each other by blood. And he's one of them. And I think that's what's we get interested in now, it's a play about politics. And we can look at our own politics and politicians in the likes of Richard III and get a bit nervous. But in years past, I don't think people were particularly interested in that. For some people Hamlet has to be the prince, he has to be about nobility. I don't think many Hamlets these days think of him like that. I think they think of him as a troubled teenager. The plays were about so many things really.
I watched Richard III again last night. The thing that struck me about it was, I had just seen the re-release of The Godfather a few days before, and how many parallels there are between the two stories.
There are, aren't there? When I was trying to raise money for Richard in Hollywood, I went to Sam Goldwyn and he said "It's too dark, Ian. The public wants Pollyanna Shakespeare." He had just produced Much Ado About Nothing, which is a much darker play than that film really is. I said 'Well you're right, it is dark, but it's about the same things that The Godfather is about.' It's about a group of people who detach themselves from society and then try to run society. They're people who are full of energy and will and all those things that we'd like to have control of ourselves. You'd have to say, of course that The Godfather is like Richard III, and not the other way around. (laughs)
If you look at the characters of Richard III and Michael Corleone, they're both men who are really dying to be loved, but wind up destroying everyone and everything that could have loved them.
Yes. Yes. Absolutely right. "Since I cannot prove a lover, I am determined to prove a villain." That's about it. Nobody loves me. Therefore, I'm going to hate.
And therein monsters are created, right?
Well...I hate it when people say things like "McKellen is the embodiment of all evil." That's really not a good analysis. It won't do to say someone is evil full stop as a sort of pat answer to the problem. "The man who blew up that building in Oklahoma is mad full stop." Well yes, he may be deranged in some way, but where does that derangement come from and why did it have this particular expression? You have to work it out to stop it from happening in the future. It's not enough to say Hitler was evil. Or Satan. Or the "evil empire" of Russia. How can you stop relating to evil? You have to start relating to humanity, to people who are doing evil things. The people themselves. They're human beings.
It's about gray areas. Things are not black and white. It's all gray.
Exactly. And if I take any message from Shakespeare it's that all the world's a stage, all its men and women merely players. We all act many parts. Good, bad, all at the same time. We're all confused. We're all mixed up. We're all capable of doing anything.
Do you have a preference for working on stage as opposed to working on film?
I've done a lot more theater than film and I've always been aware of that. I used to think I preferred the theater to film, but then I realized that it was because I understood the theater, I felt very comfortable there and it was something I was good at doing. And film, I didn't know much about. And this past six years, since Richard III closed at UCLA, I decided I was going to devote this period of my life to becoming a film actor. Which meant that I've done all sorts of odd jobs. Small parts. Odd parts. Working abroad. A western! So now, six years later, asking which I prefer is like asking me whether I'd like to have a holiday in Florence or Miami.
I know how I'd answer that one!
(laughs) I really like them both. The crucial difference, of course, is that in the theater you have to project your performance whereas on film, you just have to be your character. Deep down at the bottom they are the same. You have to use your imagination, your playfulness. Like when we're kids playing cowboys & Indians and cops & robbers. Human beings are wonderful actors. It's what separates us from the animals. Animals don't disguise themselves. You look at a dog, it's always in character. It's always itself. It's just: dog. But human beings...put on costumes every day. 'What am I going to wear today? What disguise am I going to put on? What side of my personality am I going to express today?' That's what the entire fashion industry is about, people being actors. We all act and behave differently depending on the people we're around. The way you cope with pressure and day-to-day life, acting. Not showing what we feel. That's why people are so fascinated by actors and acting, because they're actors themselves! It's all part of our nature and Shakespeare is really up on that.
What's your opinion on some of the other recent Shakespeare films?
How I judge other people's Shakespeare is, have they genuinely done the translation. Of course they can adapt to their heart's content. I have no problem with people taking a Shakespeare text and using it for their own purposes. That's what Shakespeare did with other people's stories. But if you're really going to try to do Shakespeare on film, you can do it the (Kenneth) Branagh way, which is 'I am going to do every word of Hamlet and make it very clear and very available and not get in the way.' But I'd much rather go for the current Romeo and Juliet, for example...
Did you like that?
Oh, I loved it. Well...not all of it, but I loved the intention of it. It was deliberately cinematic and not in a crude way of saying 'Oh, I don't trust this play.' (The director) just found what he wanted in the play and made it cinematic. You know when Romeo goes back into the garden to find Juliet when she appears up on the balcony, my heart sank. I thought 'Here we go again, another bloody balcony scene.' Shakespeare never mentions the word 'balcony.' It's just a device that some theater director chanced upon and everyone's been doing it ever since. Why?! Why is she up there? There's nothing in the text to say that! But then of course in the film she didn't stay on the balcony, she came out of the house. But then you've got a problem because they can't touch. That's the point of the scene. They want to have sex but they can't because she won't. And then the two of them went into the pool, started swimming and could quite touch...I thought it was a wonderful metaphor, wonderful. What's really encouraging is the number of young people I've met who think it's the best movie they've ever seen. I wish they'd seen Richard III. (laughs)
Let's talk about Richard some more. How did you come up with the conception of Richard as a Fascist dictator in the 1930's?
That came from the director, Richard Eyre, and the designer Bob Crowley. We all met over a period of months and talked together, and as very often happens when you do that when you're going to release the characters and understand them you talk about them in modern terms. But what really is the historical period of that play, is it the period that Richard lived in or the period that Shakespeare lived in? I think it serves the characters to have the play take place in as modern a setting as possible...I tend to always want to perform Shakespeare somewhere in the last hundred years, so we can relate. You don't want to get bogged down with making it all fit in some particular period, that wasn't the point. I think we were borrowing the 1930's and its social attitudes to explain the sort of people that they were and what was at stake.
Tell me about the experience of playing a real modern figure, John Profumo, in Scandal.
I did that because I had just publicly come out. It was a film at a time when I wasn't doing any films and the only thing anybody knows about John Profumo is that he was a raging heterosexual. The assumption is when you've come out that you'll never be able to play anything but gay characters again. So, I thought that was a nice message to the world that a gay actor could play a straight man. That's why I did it. It still makes me smile a bit that nobody objected to it.
Tell me about the experience of being knighted.
You'll have to come and see the show, because I talk all about it there. For me, there were two things about being knighted. In America you really don't have anything to compare it to, although most countries do. It's not like an Oscar, for example, which are just given to people in the world of film. Knighthoods are given to all sorts of people from various walks of life. I rather like the idea of a nation saying to somebody 'Thank you.' But I was openly gay. And there had only been one man before who was openly gay before he was knighted, Angus Wilson. So I knew that it would be taken as a symbolic thing by many people, and indeed that was true. Some people, some gay activists, (the late director) Derek Jarman in particular, thought I was doing absolutely the wrong thing by accepting any prize from a homophobic government. Of course he was right, it was a homophobic government. But I think that for most people, gay and straight alike, it was a genuinely hopeful sign that if an openly gay man could be invited to the palace and knighted by the Queen, then that was the establishment at last having to accept that there were in their midst people on the Queen's staff, running the Queen's army, running the Queen's government, certainly in the Queen's National Theater, gay men and women who were valued members of society as much as anybody else. And that there should be no barriers to their careers or what contributions they could make it they chose to come out and say that they were gay. And also as an activist in class-conscious Britain, it's very useful to have that handle on your name. It opens doors that otherwise wouldn't be opened for you. It gets you invited places. You are utterly respectable. They can't deny you exist. So I've been able to use (the title) to help people who've been trying to get into through these doors that they've been banging on for years.
What was your inspiration for creating A Knight Out?
I was asked to do a show at the Gay Games in New York three years ago to raise money for the games and a couple other organizations. I thought if I were going to do a show on Broadway, I'd do it about being in the theater and about being gay. I know from the questions that people ask me, they all want to know what it feels like to be an actor and what it feels like to be a gay man. And since then I've done it several times, but always as a benefit. I never take any of the profits for myself. Most excitingly, I did it in South Africa at a time when they were trying to ensure that in the equality clause in the permanent constitution sexuality was listed along with gender and race and religion...as grounds on which you could not discriminate. And there was a gay organization set up to lobby for that happen, and I helped to raise money for their campaign. I got to meet Mandella and talk with him about gay issues. That was a really remarkable moment! And here I am doing it here. I looked in my schedule when I was back in London and saw that May was free and there's a lot of theater in this town and it gets neglected sometimes. And among the other charities I'm raising money for are a scholarship in my name at UCLA, as well as a school in Koreatown I go to that has little 9, 10, and 11 year-olds who do Shakespeare after school. It's a really amazing teacher and class. On Shakespeare's birthday recently I went down and cut a cake for them, watched them perform some of A Winter's Tale ...it was wonderful because each of them understood every single word they were speaking.
Let's talk about Apt Pupil and your role as Nazi war criminal Kurt Dussander.
Well I took that because it's a big, terrific part in a big Hollywood movie. I had seen Usual Suspects and admired Bryan Singer's work a lot. It seems to be the fate of middle aged English actors to get stuck playing Nazis, but I've really enjoyed working on the film. It's a pleasure going to work every day. It's a wonderful thriller and I think it'll be a really good film, as well.
Tell me about the Stonewall Group.
At the time I came out, the Thatcher government was introducing an initiative that I'm afraid was based on an American law in some states that it would be illegal to spend any public money on the promotion of homosexuality. And out of the experience of trying to stop that law, which we didn't succeed in doing, we realized there was a need, rather late in the day, for a permanent, professional, set-up lobby group. I suppose our model was Human Rights Campaign Fund to a certain extent. We've had huge successes with our group. We've turned the British media around. I mean, you don't hear any anti-gay stories any more in the straight press, or a prejudiced story. When we get covered in the mainstream press, which we didn't ten years ago, we are on the political agenda now. More and more people are coming out, and I think Stonewall has helped with that. London is now the gay capital of Europe. The country is really waking up. The only people who're behind the times are the politicians because they don't know what's going on. To raise money for the group I put on a variety show every year at the Royal Albert Hall in London, with big stars...Melissa Ethridge, Richard Gere, Antonia Banderas and Melanie Griffith came up, Elton John often does it for me, the Pet Shop Boys, Sting...it's like a political rally with lots of entertainment! That's probably the most important job I do each year. It's doing what I know best, the theater. It's a sort of variety show like the shows I used to see at the Grand Theater in Bolton, but it's made of awareness of what it is to be gay. So it's an utterly fulfilling job for me, really because both sides of my life come together. A Knight Out is the solo version of it, really.
Any final thoughts?
Well I'm thrilled to be in L.A. at the point when Ellen DeGeneres comes out. And Anne Heche (Volcano), her girlfriend. It's probably more significant in the history of gay awareness not that a famous comedian comes out, because solo artists have always found it easier, K.D. Lang, Elton, because they're their own people. But an actor like Anne Heche, she's just a working actress and like all actors depends on being employed, which is dependent on other people's attitudes. Producers. Directors. Advertisers. And the fact that she's come out, when she's got more than a burgeoning career, it'll be more interesting to see what happens to her career. Ellen can always go out on her own on the stage as a comedian and continue making a living. It's a bit more difficult for a regular actor. But it's terrific being here with the whole nation talking about it...this is big stuff, it's great. And reverberations for the world. It's a great time to be alive as a gay person.
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